A communication resource from the world's particle physics laboratories.

AAAS Meeting Presents Particle Physics' Past, Present, and Future

14 February 2012

Interaction Collaboration

Vancouver, Canada -- Tantalizing hints of the elusive Higgs boson! Neutrinos that appear to travel faster than light! New particles! The mere inkling of a particle physics discovery gets the globe buzzing, and 2012 is shaping up to be another big year for particle physics news. Scientific leaders from laboratories around the world will present the latest particle physics findings and give a look at what's next at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science starting tomorrow in Vancouver, Canada.

The Higgs boson is top on the list for 2012, as experiments in Europe and the United States will eliminate its last hiding spots. In the first of two particle physics sessions at the AAAS Annual Meeting, Rob Roser from Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in the United States will present the latest findings from experiments at the Tevatron collider. The Tevatron experiments continue to comb through more than two decades of data in search of the Higgs boson and answers to other fundamental questions about matter, energy, space and time. Research Director Sergio Bertolucci from the CERN laboratory in Switzerland will present results from the first full run of the Large Hadron Collider, as well as expectations for 2012 when the collider will reach even higher energies.

Looking even farther ahead, in the same session physicist Lia Merminga from the TRIUMF laboratory in Vancouver will discuss cutting-edge technologies for the next generation of particle accelerators. With more than 30,000 accelerators in operation around the world, the technologies being developed today at laboratories in North America, Europe and Asia will not only enable new scientific discoveries, but potentially touch every aspect of society from industrial processes to cancer treatment.

Particle physics is science at its most international, with collaborations of hundreds of scientists from dozens of countries coming together in the pursuit of a greater understanding of the universe. In the second session focused on particle physics at the AAAS Annual Meeting, the leaders of Japanese, American, European and Canadian particle physics laboratories will discuss how particle physicists surmount cross-border and cross-cultural challenges to achieve their scientific goals. They will also look ahead to the new form of global partnership that will be needed to build the world's next big particle physics facility.

For more information about the global science of particle physics, visit www.interactions.org or follow @particlenews on Twitter.

About the InterAction Collaboration

The InterAction Collaboration supports the worldwide science of particle physics through cooperation in communication. InterAction Collaboration members represent particle physics laboratories in Asia, Europe and North America. Learn more at http://www.interactions.org.